Whoopi Goldberg admits she’d leave The View if she had more money, says she’s having ‘a hard time’ like many Americans

The View star and Oscar-winning icon Whoopi Goldberg is hustling for her paycheck just like the rest of America, thank you very much.

One day before her 69th birthday, the Ghost actress and View cohost said on Tuesday’s live show that she identified with the struggles of the working class and that, if she were the richest person alive, she wouldn’t show up to moderate the long-running ABC talk show anymore.

I appreciate that people are having a hard time. Me, too. I work for a living,” Goldberg said, breaking growing tension about Donald Trump’s second-term presidency that arose during a Hot Topic about Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asking her social media followers about their voting practices.

Goldberg then turned to the studio audience to stress, “If I had all the money in the world, I would not be here, okay? So, I’m a working person, you know?”

“My kid has to feed her family. My great-granddaughter has to be fed by her family. I know it’s hard out there,” she continued. “I love what [Ocasio-Cortez] did. Yay. We talk to people all the time who say, ‘This is what’s bothering me.’ But, the thing that’s bothering everybody should not be the thing that puts 85 percent of other people in danger. I think that’s what we’re saying.”
The moment recalled former cohost Meghan McCain’s past comments about what she suggested was a disconnect between the show’s lineup and the public tuning in.

“I had an experience while I was working at ABC News [on The View]. I was in a particularly heated Hot Topics meeting. I remember yelling at the meeting that, ‘Some of you’ or ‘All of you are going to have to start interacting with people who don’t make $100,000 a year or more. You have to interact with someone who makes minimum wage on some level or another,'” McCain said in April.
Outside of OG panelist Joy Behar, who was absent from the table on Tuesday’s broadcast, Goldberg is the longest-running permanent cohost on the show, having first joined the program in 2007.

In addition to her time on the show, Goldberg hasn’t skimped on her acting prowess, as she’s appeared in several major projects in recent years, including on TV shows like The Stand, Harlem, and returning as Guinan for two episodes of Star Trek: Picard.
She’s also currently at work on bringing Sister Act 3 to Disney+, having revealed last week during an interview with Jimmy Fallon that the script had to be reworked following the death of Maggie Smith, who seemingly would’ve returned for the third film in the series.